It's interesting that even at the age of 2 or 3, I began to get an
intuition about the way to create music. I didn't really start to do it
until 1958, when I wrote the Trio for Strings, which is the first work in the history of music that is completely composed of long sustained tones and silences.

This reminds me of one of those Rob Kapilow lectures on why Mozart is so great:

Things are never as simple as they seem.... The next phrase of music continues elegantly...followed by an astonishing measure of complete silence.

Ok, I'll grant the music is graceful and elegant but after hearing the art of Cage, Young, and Johnson, sorry, "classical" silence like this no longer astonishes.

Although I don't want to cause Fred dismay, in order to re-calibrate my ears for "legacy" music, I'm taking Hucbald's suggestion to focus on Haydn rather than Mozart. And I have yet to decide if I'll attend Kapilow's Stanford program on Copland's Appalachian Spring.

Via David Beardsley, the MELA Foundation announces, in honor of La Monte Young's 70th birthday, a performance of Trio for Strings at the Dream House in New York. Composed while Young was at UCLA, the trio is an early example of using long, sustained tones as the organizing principle and is a benchmark of the minimalism movement. It lasts about an hour.

The composer quoted by Keith Potter in Four Musical Minimalists:

The Trio is, he avers, 'a rather tonal piece. It's in some sort of C ... probably C-minor .... It doesn't start there, but it gets there...

Potter also suggests Milton Babbitt admired the music of Young at the time.